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Autobiography recommended for historical details

25/3/2021

The Little Doctor: The autobiography of Guy Scholefield

Dr Scholefield’s eventful working life took him to all parts of New Zealand, Australia, the islands of the Pacific and to Britain and Europe. The editor of the book, Ian Grant, discovered the unpublished manuscript in the Alexander Turnbull Library. It has now been published by the Wairarapa Times-Age.
Scholefield’s mother encouraged his love of literature and he hoped to earn his living through creative writing. There were few job vacancies when he completed grammar school in Milton, Otago, but he found work as a compositor for the Bruce Herald newspaper. A conscientious worker, he was soon given the extra responsibility of reporting on local meetings.
In 1899, he moved to Wellington – a two-day sea voyage from Dunedin – to take up employment with the New Zealand Times. He describes the North Island as a frontier land, half unopened with practically no trunk railways. There he made his mark reporting on a wide range of events and issues from local meetings and agricultural shows, to shipping accidents and national politics. It was an eventful period for journalists: Prime Minister Dick Seddon died during a voyage from Australia to New Zealand, the Russo-Japanese war took place and New Zealand became a dominion within the British Empire.
Scholefield’s work took him to all parts of New Zealand, much of it on horseback, and twice to Australia. After becoming Chief of Staff on the newspaper, he found very little time for creative writing, though he did manage to publish a booklet about the main trunk line and lay the beginnings of a New Zealand Who’s Who.
In 1908 Scholefield took a position as London Correspondent with New Zealand Associated Press, providing world news to New Zealand newspapers. Before departure he married Adela Bree, who accompanied him to England, where their three children were born. He spent the next ten years in Europe, covering the First World War and travelling into France as a war correspondent. During his time abroad, he wrote his thesis – The Pacific: Its Past and Future – for which the London School of Economics awarded him a doctorate in economics and political science. Before leaving England, he was awarded an OBE.
On return to New Zealand, he was invited to join a government group to visit New Zealand’s Pacific dependencies and determine requirements for their administration. Barely back on home soil he was seconded as official historian for the Prince of Wales’ tour of New Zealand. This was followed by a period of running the Wairarapa Age in Masterton, chairing the local school board and involvement in numerous organizations and committees. He was appointed Parliamentary Librarian in 1926, and worked there for 21 years, initiating the Archive Division which became our National Archive. During this period he broadcast popular weekly radio talks. He also wrote and published several books, including his third issue of New Zealand Who’s Who.
The Little Doctor is only 130 pages long but packed with detail. As a reporter, Scholefield was involved in the important issues of the day – economics, education, politics – and recorded significant developments. Possibly his greatest contribution was indexing and preserving national records. His autobiography lists the names of a large number of colleagues, many who may be unknown to readers. While this interrupts the narrative, it could be useful to anyone researching New Zealand history. We are told very little about his own family. There is a brief comment about his wife visiting wounded New Zealand servicemen in hospital. This, in part, may have prompted him to accelerate the planned publication of the New Zealander a news sheet which was distributed to all servicemen serving abroad during the remainder of the war.
I would certainly recommend Dr Guy Scholefield’s autobiography to anyone with an interest in New Zealand history. It has encouraged me to explore the ten other works listed in his Select Biography.

Review by Ian Clarke

Title: The Little Doctor: The autobiography of Guy Scholefield
Author: Guy Scholefield
Publisher: Fraser Books/Wairarapa Times Age
ISBN: 978-0-9941360-8-4
RRP: $30.00
Available: Softcover only, from bookshops, Fraser Books website

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Novel a pleasure to read

18/3/2021

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The Remarkable Miss Digby
by Patricia Donovan

This book of 97,500 words in 257 pages supports the relevance of the aphorism concerning truth being stranger than fiction, for it builds an entertaining novel upon the biography of a nineteenth-century female aristocrat who jumped the fence erected by the conventions, mores and expectations of her peers to follow her inclinations in living life exactly as she wished. More precisely, the book traces her life in Syria, whence she went in 1853 as a woman in her fourth decade of life, an age when she “ought” to have been grandmothering another generation of the Ellenborough dynasty into which she had married at the age of seventeen.
That we do not find Jane Elizabeth Digby, ex-Lady Ellenborough, doing this is due to the fact that she has lived her life as a remarkably sensual being, and her appreciation of the fragrance of campfire woodsmoke; the clarity of the desert air; the feel of goatskin tent-walls; the enormity of the desert and, hardly surprisingly, the freedom from stays, corsets and petticoats afforded her by the decision to adopt Bedouin clothing simply underlines that sensuality.
An opening premise of the book is that, in wishing to view the Roman ruins at Palmyra, Digby is ‘going boldly where no (woman) has gone before...’ but, as noted, she has been doing that very thing all her life and in her own words, “... marriage must be to a man who will let me be myself.” This feature of her character is at once the strength of Ms Donovan’s book and its great weakness, because on closing it, one wonders why this volume isn’t the third of a trilogy, for Miss Digby was remarkable for many more than the last thirty years of her life.
In her story previous husbands, lovers, fiancés, relatives and children enter and flash past in a manner often bewildering and sometimes mystifying. Four husbands and a dizzying procession of lovers, two of them royal and the others a mixture of the aristocratic and the military, ending with a cross-cultural marriage to a Bedouin sheikh certainly indicate her determination to do as she wishes, even as it points to the irony of her ‘finding herself’ in a culture not known for emancipating its women.
Similarly, one of her purposes in residing in Syria is to establish an Arab horse stud and one feels that her love of horses and expertise with them deserves a fuller treatment, while it is hard to ascertain where she gains sufficient familiarity with firearms to down a bird with a pistol from horseback while at full gallop.
Technically, the book is a pleasure to read for the prose is taut, well-written, splendidly proof-read and edited. Some of the dialogue is suspiciously twentieth-century; the formality of someone “...proffering greetings...” sitting uneasily with his next assertion that ...”the name’s Watson, Reverend Watson...”, while his wife’s use of the term “We hail from the same neck of the woods...” is a little American for a 19th century vicar’s wife. However, such lapses are rare and more than balanced by Ms Donovan’s dedication to helping the reader to visualise times past through the eyes of her characters, such as when Jane experiences her lessons in Arabic, or goes shopping in the Damascus soukfor native clothing.
Again— there is enough material here, and sufficient resources, to make the story of this remarkable woman, her life, times and sentiments, into a trilogy and one hopes that Ms Donovan will one day treat us to a prequel, at least.

Review by MJ Burr

Title: The Remarkable Miss Digby
Author: Patricia Donovan
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473546717
RRP: $29.95
Available: paper: bookshops

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Novel shows 19th century life

11/3/2021

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The Nine Lives of Kitty K.
An Unsung Heroine of the Goldfields
by Margaret Mills

This, the life story of a South Island identity, can be read as an allegory. Arriving as a baby in the Otago of 1856, ‘Kitty’ Cameron owes her past to the moral taboos of the Old World and her present and future to the mores of the New. Her pregnant mother, Catherine, is forced into marriage with a homosexual relative of the baby’s nobly-born father and sent to the colonies on remittance, thereby removing three embarrassments to the family at one blow.
Catherine proves remarkably resilient as both mother and dairymaid after the planned disappearance of her husband, and manages to see out Kitty’s early years in the young colony of Dunedin before taking up with would-be farmer George Kirk and moving with a now ten-year-old Kitty to Wakatipu.
Adept with animals of all sorts, Kitty’s life is lived out in the Wakatipu, thereafter between Kinloch and Fairlight and, even as she grows, marries and starts a family, she maintains a near-legendary status as a horsewoman. She is cursed in areas of personal relationships and essentially marries to escape an acrimonious relationship with her mother, who never gives up her Old-World determination to get her spirited daughter to ‘know her place’ in the world despite an elevation to the status of landowner that would have been impossible for Catherine herself in her native Ireland.
Sadly, Kitty’s choice of husband isn’t a good one, and John Greig emerges as a controlling bully with a drinking problem, but the clarity of his depiction tells the reader a good deal about the social attitudes of miner society. Tragedy also haunts Kitty in the loss of three of her children and the estrangement of a fourth consequent on her decision to leave the unhappy marriage and, after a brief interlude in a happy relationship, she ultimately enters a downward spiral that is better read about than described because of what it leaves unsaid about Kitty.
At several places the book offers good and valid glimpses of life, manners, morals and expectations in 19thcentury New Zealand’s mining societies, but the first point to be made about it is that, at over 150,000 words it is over-long. In part this is because, up to “Life” 4, Kitty’s story is a construct unfounded on fact, and while the author has undoubtedly researched widely to create what is basically a novel to that point, she has given way to the temptation to include all of it. An outstanding example of this is the inclusion of the life and disappointments of ‘Mr Rees’, which a reader struggles to accept as necessary. Sometimes, knowing what to leave out is just as important as knowing what to put in, and aspects of the work badly need the sort of editing that keeps a story moving and buoyant.
As contrast, the story from “Life” 5 onwards is much tighter and closely-drawn, and it is no coincidence that the references listed by the author appear to date from that point of the story. It is also not without significance that the person who appears to have been the architect of Kitty’s story, Mary-Jane Mulholland, appears in it at that time. It’s hard to avoid the conclusion that Kitty’s story ought to have begun at Life 5 when, with sympathetic editing, the back story that currently takes up some 50,000 words could have been expressed in many fewer.
Part of the problem in writing about the past is the necessity of avoiding anachronism. Halfway through the 19th century, people did not ‘sign off’ on documents, nor did they ‘take his answer on board’. Life did not ‘just get a whole lot better’, and if anyone was ‘blown away’ it was probably by explosives and not by the beauty of Lake Wakatipu.
Consistency of character underpins a story for a reader, and while we learn that the tomboy Kitty is unusually mature for her years in thought and vocabulary, by the same token it is unfortunate that the Catherine established early on as capable and resilient becomes a person who dissolves in tears at each and any setback.
As in any work of history, though, seeing events through the eyes of the people of the time only enhances the experience and promotes understanding, and none of the technical issues mentioned in connection with “The Nine Lives of Kitty K . . .” detract significantly from its contribution to a much-needed and important body of New Zealand literature.

Review by MJ Burr

Title: The Nine Lives of Kitty K
Author: Margaret Mills
Publisher: Mary Egan Publishing
ISBN: 9780473542030
RRP: $34.95
Available: paper: bookshops

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A book for families

4/3/2021

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This is Where I Stand
by Philippa Werry
& Kieran Rynhart

Standard picture-book format – 30 pages with full page illustrations, simple text. But what is the target age group?
The colours are mainly muted, with the emphasis on greys, browns, sepia, the people pictured mostly adult, not smiling, sad.
Even more unusual in a picture-book apparently intended for young children are the images of warfare and weaponry.
So to the text by Philippa Werry – first person ‘thoughts’ by the figure central to the images. A stone soldier standing on a plinth, hat in hand, rifle slung over his shoulder. He remembers –
“the sand of the desert, the bustling streets of Cairo, the beaches and steep cliffs of Gallipoli, the ruined villages of France.”
Since then he has stood on his mounting and seen life since – back in this, his homeland, over the decades between then and now. Not dwelling on the horrors of the trenches and battlefields, but viewing the anguish of those who lost loved ones in those far places, seeing the figures of fellow soldiers who returned but with body-parts missing – passing time marked year by year by Anzac Day observances.
From his vantage point he is an observer – in contrast to his form, largely avoiding taking a concrete stand on the morality or otherwise of past events. In this case there is something of an enigma in the title.
Who is he, then? Rather than being the portrayal of a specific warrior or representation of an unknown warrior, the figure identifies himself as “I am memory.”
So it’s a book not so much for children as for families. Parents, even better perhaps grandparents, are needed to introduce, read, explain history and concepts.
While the wording of the text is chosen for easy reading, there’s poetic lyricism in the lines and depth in the ideas.
The text and the illustrations by Kieran Rynhart are well integrated in this thought provoking book.

Review by Bronwyn Elsmore

Title: This is Where I Stand
Author: Philippa Werry, Kieran Rynhart illustrator
Publisher: Scholastic NZ
ISBN: 978-1-77543-384-2
RRP: $27.99
Available: bookshops

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Autobiography recommended for historical details

Novel a pleasure to read

Novel shows 19th century life

A book for families

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